


The Time that is Given Us

by RachelClark



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - The Time Traveler's Wife, Autism Spectrum, Crossover, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kid Fic, Multi, Rachel tries to fix far too many things with one fic, Section 31, Technobabble, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-01 00:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12693465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RachelClark/pseuds/RachelClark
Summary: Following his repeated exposure to radioisotopes during the episode ‘Visionary’, Miles O'Brien finds himself spontaneously jumping through time during moments of stress. These time-jumps take him into the pasts and futures of the most significant people in his life, and most frequently into the unexpectedly strange childhood of Doctor Julian Bashir.Sylvia Tilly has waited ninety years for an opportunity to take down the clandestine black ops division of Starfleet that caused her friends aboard the USS Discovery so much pain. The incursion of a time-jumping engineer and an unusually gifted seven-year-old into the sanctuary she has built for herself and her remaining friends just wasn’t exactly how she imagined that opportunity would arise.





	1. Chapter 1

_2347 – (Miles is 45, Julian is 6)_

The first time Julian meets Miles, he is pretty sure the nice Irishman in the Starfleet uniform is a figment of his imagination. 

Julian is twelve days into the therapy Dad says is going to fix him, so he'll be able to think and behave more like normal humans, to keep up with his classmates and make his parents proud.

He is trying very hard not to be afraid, but he feels like every day he spends in the hospital is even scarier than the one before. There's something not quite right about that... the treatments are meant to improve him, so shouldn't he be getting braver?

The Doctors in the hospital are creepy. He doesn’t like it when they put their too-cold hands on him, and he especially doesn’t like when they put him in the containment field so he can’t move. They give him injections that make him feel hot and itchy and sick. Once a day they put his head in a big machine and when they turn it on it feels like a hundred burning needles sticking in his brain.

Mum usually stays with him at night, but she was crying this afternoon and Dad told her she looked knackered and made her go back to the hotel to rest. Dad had promised her he’d stay with Julian, and when Julian had fallen asleep he’d been sitting in the armchair across the room playing a card game on the holo-projector.

Julian wakes up from a bad dream in the middle of the night. His head hurts and when he opens his eyes the room is swimming and he’s just barely able to roll onto his side before he is violently sick. It comes up in great, choking heaves and it’s all he can do to cling to the side of the bed and hold himself up so most of it goes on the floor and not on the sheets.

Once the worst of the nausea has passed he collapses back against his pillows. Taking care to move his head slowly, he looks around the room. It's quite dark, but the light from Adigeon Prime's moons shining in through the windows is just bright enough for him to see that he is completely alone.

“Mum…” he says weekly, before remembering she’s at the hotel, that Dad is supposed to be here instead. When he comes back he’ll probably be really cross with Julian for being sick on the floor.

“Julian…?”

The bed dips, and a strange man is sitting there frowning at him like he’s one of the very complicated puzzles the doctors have been making Julian do to see how much smarter the treatments are making him. Julian wonders where he came from; he definitely wasn't there a moment ago, and Julian is sure he would have noticed the door open.

The man is human, like Julian, and he looks old (the way all adults do when you’re six). He has curly yellow hair and kind eyes.

“Who are you?” Julian whispers hoarsely, his throat still burning from being sick.

“You don’t know me?” the man asks.

Julian shakes his head.

The man looks around, taking in the monitoring probes attached to Julian’s shaved head and all the machines positioned around the room, as well as Julian’s tearstained face and the mess on the floor.

“Julian… is this… are we on Adigeon Prime?” the man asks carefully.

What a funny question. Why would the man not know what planet they’re on? Maybe he’s an idiot, like Julian. Maybe he’s here to get his head fixed too… except he’s wearing a Starfleet uniform (albeit a funny-looking one with grey shoulders and a mustard-coloured undershirt) and you have to be really smart to be in Starfleet.

“Yes,” says Julian. “Are you being fixed as well?”

“Fixed?”

“Because you’re not good enough,” Julian explains, and then he realizes he might have sounded rude, so he adds, “I mean, you seem normal, but if you’re a patient here there must be something about you that needs fixing.”

“Who told you that?” the man asks.

“My dad,” says Julian

“I see,” says the man. His voice sounds a bit less kind now. “I’m actually just… visiting the hospital. Where are your parents? Shouldn’t someone be here looking after you?”

“Mum isn’t very well,” Julian mumbles, turning his face sideways into his pillow, “and Dad…” 

He suddenly thinks about Dad coming back and seeing what a mess he’s made, how much of a baby he’s been. Panicked, he pushes himself into a sitting position… and is promptly overcome by another wave of nausea.

This time the man manages to wrap an arm around him and shove a basin under his head, although there’s not much left to come up; they only let you eat juice and soup here, so although Julian is sick a lot it’s not as uncomfortable as it might be if he was eating proper food.

The man presses a cup of water into his hands. “Slowly,” he says. “If you drink it too fast you might be sick again.”

“I need to clean it up,” he says when he’s finished drinking, “or Dad will get angry when he sees.”

“Is that right?” says the man, and Julian can here that edge in his voice again, like he’s cross about something but doesn’t want to say what it is. “Well, we can’t have that, can we? I’ll tell you what, why don’t we pop you in the chair over there for a few minutes, while I clean this up and change the sheets, hmm? Your dad’ll be none the wiser.”

“Okay,” says Julian, and the man bundles him up in the duvet and carries him over to the armchair. 

When he’s done cleaning up the man helps Julian into a clean pyjama top and tucks him back into bed.

“Why are you taking care of me?” Julian asks him sleepily.

“Because,” the man says, “you and I are friends, and we take care of each other.”

“But I don’t know you,” Julian says, confused.

“No,” the man agrees, “but you will.”

That doesn't make very much sense to Julian. Still, he's getting smarter every day so maybe he'll figure it out in time.

He feels himself drifting back into sleep. After a few minutes, he hears the man talking quietly.

“You daft lad,” he says, “why didn’t you tell me it was like this?”

“Mmm not daft,” Julian murmurs.

“No,” says the man, sounding a little sad. Julian feels a hand on his head, smoothing over the soft fuzz that's grown in since the doctor's removed his hair on the first day of the treatments. “No, I don’t suppose you are.”

  
***  


_2369 - (Miles is 40, Julian is 27)_

The first time Miles O'Brien meets Julian Bashir, Julian makes a total arse out of himself.

Julian has been on Deep Space Nine for about two hours and is treating his first patient, a little human girl named Molly with a scraped knee.

“Normally I would have treated it at home,” Molly’s mother Keiko explains apologetically as Julian runs a dermal regenerator over the cut, “but she hasn’t been vaccinated against Bajoran or Cardassian viruses yet, and with the station being such a mess...”

“Keiko,” the infirmary doors open and in walks Miles, looking anxious and younger than Julian has ever seen him. “Is she okay?”

“Miles!” Julian isn’t quite able to suppress the startled exclamation; he’s barely able to stop himself from throwing his arms around the other man. Miles has been Julian’s best friend since Julian was seven years old. Julian’s mind is suddenly flooded with memories of the time they’ve spent together. Miles helping him with his school science project. Miles helping him find his way home after he'd run away and ended up lost in the mountains when he was eight, and talking him into going back to Earth when he fled all the way to Jupiter Station at fifteen. Helping him break into the Admiral’s lab when he was seven, holding his hand while he cried after her memorial service…

But this isn’t Julian’s Miles. Everything is in the future for him, and whatever it is that triggers his time-jumping hasn’t even happened yet. This Miles is younger than Julian has ever seen him, and there’s no spark of recognition in his eyes when he looks at Julian. Julian hadn't had any idea that Miles would be here on Deep Space Nine when he'd put himself forward for this assignment; he'd known he would meet Miles in his own timeline eventually, but he hadn't known where or when. Miles had explained basic temporal mechanics to him when he was seven, had made Julian promise not to try to find him. _"If you do, you might change my timeline,"_ he had said, _"and the thing that gave me the ability to time-travel might not happen at all..."_

“Do I know you?” The present Miles asks, confused.

“Ah,” says Julian. “No, sorry, that was unforgivably forward of me. I just… I spoke with Doctor Crusher last week to pick her brains about her report on public health in Bajoran refugee camps, and she mentioned you were transferring over from the Enterprise. I guess I just… recognized the name."

“And you are…” says Miles, raising an eyebrow.

“Julian,” says Julian, “I mean, ah, Doctor Julian Bashir.”

“Huh,” says Miles, “I thought Starfleet was only sending one doctor out here.”

“They are,” says Julian, “me.”

“ _You’re_ the CMO? Aren’t you a little young?”

Julian might have taken offence if he didn’t already have two decades of experience with Miles’s reactions to Julian doing things Miles thought Julian was too young to do.

“Miles, don’t be rude,” Keiko scolds, and Julian finds himself really looking at her for the first time. He’s always known Miles was married with at least one child in his own time, but it’s still quite something to be able to meet his family in person. 

_“Having them doesn’t mean I love you any less,”_ Miles had once told him, _“It’s… well, for a start it’s one of those things I can’t tell you about because it could contaminate the timeline, but beyond that, I don’t know that I can explain it. It took me a long time to understand it myself.”_ Julian had been nine at the time, curled up in Miles’s arms on the Admiral's veranda. Miles had been quite old himself. He was always more open about the fact that he cared for Julian when he was old.

 _“Will you love me straight away when we meet in my timeline?”_ Julian had asked him.

Miles has snorted with laughter at the idea. _“God, no,”_ he said emphatically. _“I thought you were an obnoxious, arrogant pain in the arse when we first met… and the worst thing is now I’ve gotten to know you I realise that half the time you were doing it on purpose.”_

 _“I would never!”_ Julian had protested.

 _“You say that now, but you just wait and see what a monster you turn into when you hit your teens”_ had been Miles’s fond reply. _“You’ll need to be patient with me, Julian. It’ll take me a couple of years to warm up to you, but we’ll get there.”_

Julian thinks he can live with that; after eight years without seeing Miles at all, getting to see him almost every day, getting to know what he was like before he started time-jumping, getting to know his family… it's everything Julian has ever wanted. If it means having to cope with the fact that Miles doesn't like him all that much to begin with, Julian can live with that.

Keiko returns Julian’s curious gaze with a warm smile. “Don’t mind him,” she says. “We’ve had a rough week and it’s made us all a little grouchy. Living off of Starfleet field rations is tiresome at the best of times... I don’t recommend trying it with a three-year-old.”

“Haven’t got the replicators online yet?” Julian says sympathetically

Miles seems to take the question as a personal affront. “We’re doing our best,” he says defensively, “If the Cardies weren’t so bloody secretive about their technology…”

“Miles, don’t call them that in front of Molly," says Keiko, "I won’t have her inheriting your prejudice.”

“Prejudice?” says Miles, incensed. “Do you have any idea…”

Julian clears his throat loudly. “I… ah… look, I’ve got a few supplies from Earth in my luggage. Juice, biscuits, chocolate… nothing fancy. Can I give you some just to tide her over for the next day or two while you get the replicators sorted?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Miles says tightly.

 _“Miles,”_ Keiko says through gritted teeth. “That’s very kind of you Doctor, if you’re sure you can spare it.”

“My pleasure,” says Julian.

Miles rolls his eyes. “I’ve got to get back to back to ops,” he says and leans down to kiss Molly on the forehead. Watching it makes Julian’s heart ache.

 _Nope,_ he tells himself, _I am not jealous of a two-year-old._

“I’m glad you’re alright, sweetheart,” Miles tells his daughter softly. “I’ll see you at home,” he adds to Keiko.

He doesn’t spare Julian so much as a glance before he leaves. Julian watches him go, feeling inexplicably forlorn.

“Don’t worry,” says Keiko. Julian turns to look at her and for a moment he fancies the smile on her face is rather more knowing than it ought to be. She places a reassuring hand on Julian’s forearm and adds, “he’ll warm up to you in time.”


	2. Chapter 2

_2371 and 2349 – (Miles is 43, Julian is 29 and 7)_

It’s been a bitch of a day even by Miles’s standards.

An unexpected injection of radiation poisoning courtesy of a faulty plasma conduit had only been the beginning of it; thanks to the presence of a quantum singularity in the form of a cloaked Romulan Warbird, his poor irradiated body has spent the last twelve hours jumping back and forth through time. He’s witnessed the destruction of Deep Space Nine, watched himself die, stood over his own cold corpse, and finally replaced a past version of himself who’s now either dead from radiation poisoning or part of a timeline that’s been completely erased. 

Miles hates temporal mechanics. 

He throws his last dart, landing an eighteen instead of the double one he needs to win the game. Bloody typical.

“So you’re telling me that you remember playing this game with me in the future?” Julian asks, stepping up to take his turn.

“Right.”

“Alright, what am I going to hit?”

“Double top.”

It’s what he needs to win, after all. In the other timeline, Julian had made the shot easily. This time, he screws his eyes tightly shut before he throws. The dart lands bang in the centre of the double-twenty anyway. 

“That’s remarkable,” he says.

“It’s also a little disturbing,” says Miles. “I have this nagging feeling that I don’t really belong here. This isn’t really my life. Maybe this life belongs to that other Miles O'Brien.”

Julian looks upset by the idea. Come to think of it, he’s been a bit out of sorts all evening. He keeps shooting these little sidelong glances at Miles as though he’s expecting him to disappear again, even though he’d insisted on scanning Miles three times to reassure himself that he’d successfully eliminated all of the radioisotopes from his friend’s body.

Miles wonders if he feels responsible for what happened to the other him. Apparently, it had been Miles’s idea to flood his own body with radioactive isotopes in order to initiate a controlled time jump, but Julian had been the one who’d figured out how to calibrate the decay constant of the isotope to actually make it possible. 

“Listen, Chief,” the doctor says carefully, “whether you’re living in the past or in the present, you are Miles O'Brien. The only difference is you have a few memories the other one didn’t have.”

Miles sighs, “Well,” he says, “I think I’ll go to bed. I’m still kind of tired.”

He says goodnight to his friend and heads for home, stopping to tease Quark by sharing his foreknowledge of a particularly loud Dabo call on the way out. Julian continues to watch him anxiously. Miles resolves to stop teasing the doctor about ‘letting’ the other him die; he’s obviously taken it to heart.

He’s barely halfway down the promenade when the world around him shifts. _Not again_ , is all he has time to think before a wave of dizziness sends him spinning to the ground in a dead faint.

  
  
  
“Miles.”

Someone’s tiny, delicate hand gently pats his cheek. 

“Miles, wake up.” A child’s voice, eager, impatient. “I want to check my theory and you being asleep might mess up my readings.”

The patting becomes slightly more forceful. Miles swats ineffectually at whoever is doing it.

“Miles!” An exasperated sigh... and then something cold and wet hits him in the face, startling him into full consciousness.

He lets out a startled grunt and blinks his eyes open. The sun in the sky above his head is bright enough that he finds himself needing to shield them with his hand. Bloody marvellous... now he's apparently travelling in space as well as time.

There’s a little boy a couple of years older than Molly gazing down at him with a gap-toothed smile, holding an empty water bottle in one hand. There’s something familiar about his impish expression and wide hazel eyes, but Miles can’t quite place it…

“Good,” the boy says decisively, “You’re awake. Stay right here, I’m going to get the Admiral.”

“Admiral?” says Miles.

But the boy is already dashing off across the terrace and into the sprawling timber cabin that overlooks it.

Miles wipes his dripping face on the back of his uniform sleeve and slowly pushes himself to his feet. 

The cabin overlooks a roaring ocean under a cloud-streaked sky. The sand on the beach below is black, and the surrounding hills are covered by lush forest. 

The terrace looks as though it was built so whoever lives in the cabin can spend a lot of time outside. There’s a raised platform at one end, where an old-fashioned refractor telescope has been set up. It's undoubtedly an excellent stargazing spot.

There’s a dining table and chairs in the middle of the terrace, and a wicker couch heaped with cushions and throws at the other end. Miles suddenly becomes aware that there’s an old man seated there. His posture is upright and he is sitting completely still, his milk-white eyes staring unseeingly at the horizon.

“I’m sorry,” Miles begins, “I didn’t see you there…”

“He can’t hear you,” the boy explains, re-emerging from the cabin. “Doctor Culber says his body’s here, but his consciousness is somewhere else.” He says it matter-of-factly, as though it's a perfectly acceptable scientific explanation for an entirely mundane state of affairs. 

Miles finds himself staring at those milk-white eyes. To his own eyes, the man looks catatonic… and perhaps he is. Perhaps someone had thought the idea that his mind was out there exploring the universe without his body was a kind lie to tell a child.

“Can I scan you now?”

Miles turns his attention back towards the boy. He’s holding what looks like on old TR-520 medical tricorder. 

“What?”

“He wants to see if he can figure out how you got here.”

An old woman steps out onto the deck. Her hair is a riot of steel grey curls under a wide-brimmed straw hat – worn to protect her rather Irish-looking complexion from the sun, no doubt. There are deep lines around her eyes and mouth that suggest she has led a long life during which she has found more opportunities to smile than to frown. She’s smiling at Miles now, her expression urging him to indulge her.

“Right,” says Miles. "Well... I guess I'd like to know that, too."

He doubts that a child who looks to be about seven is going to be able to provide him with any answers, but he doesn’t see any harm in letting the kid take the scan. He can always analyse the data himself afterwards. “Come on, then,” he says, holding his arms out.

The boy steps forward eagerly, dragging one of the dining chairs with him and stepping up onto its cushioned seat so that the two of them can stand eye to eye. He holds the tricorder’s base unit in one hand and moves the hand scanner around Miles’s head with the other. His movements are fastidious, as though it has been impressed upon him that the tricorder should be handled with the utmost care.

He’s a clever little thing, Miles finds himself thinking. Medical tricorders aren’t exactly the most user-friendly of computers. He watches the boy's keen eyes darting between the scanner and the readings. There’s something about the way his expression changes when data starts to appear on the screen. One moment he’s carefree and wide-eyed, the next there’s a furrow in his brow that’s too deep for his young face… and suddenly Miles knows exactly why he’d thought the boy familiar.

“Julian?”

The furrow is instantly gone, and the expression that replaces it is one of unabashed delight. 

“I told you he’d recognise you,” the old woman says knowingly.

“I'm hallucinating,” Miles says aloud. 

“Actually,” Julian says with an impressive degree of authority, “it looks like repeated exposure to radioisotopes triggered a mutation in your cerebrospinal nerve cells that causes you to ‘jump’ through space and time when you feel… exhausted? or stressed-out?” He frowns and tilts his head to the side, as though the new angle might make the readings tell him something else. “That doesn’t explain why you come to see _me_ , though.”

Miles finds himself staring incredulously at this tiny version of the man who - in spite of everything Miles has done over the years to try and deter him - has become his best friend on Deep Space Nine. Perhaps the best friend he has. 

When it comes to medicine, Julian Bashir has always been precocious, but what he’s just said seems a tad advanced for even the brightest of seven-year-olds.

"What year is it?" he asks.

"Twenty-three forty-nine," says Julian.

“You’re telling me I’ve… travelled back in time more than twenty years to… visit _you_? And I’ve done this before?”

“S..six times now, for me,” Julian says softly. He starts fiddling with the tricorder, opening and closing the flap. “This is the first one for you, though.” 

“How do you know that?” he asks.

“B… because you gave me the dates,” Julian replies, a little defensively.

The old woman comes to stand behind him. On the chair, he’s an inch taller than her, and so it looks like the most natural thing in the world for her to take his arm and wrap it around her shoulders while she puts her own arm around his waist. “You’ll drain the power,” she tells him gently, inclining her head towards the tricorder, before looking pointedly at Miles, "and as for you, try not to sound so cross; it's hardly his fault you're having a bad day."

Julian stops fidgeting and leans into her. “You never tell me how it happens,” he tells Miles a little sullenly, “but you said I was welcome to try and figure it out myself, so I did. Kind of. Doctor Culber and Admiral Tilly helped.”

“Admiral Tilly?” Miles repeats.

“Sylvia,” says the old woman, holding out the hand that isn’t wrapped around Julian’s waist for him to shake.

“Sylvia Tilly?” Miles says again in disbelief, “the theoretical astrophysicist?”

He watches as she and Julian exchange looks; hers says ‘I told you so’, while his is the exact expression of disgust Miles enjoys seeing on the rare occasions he manages to break Julian’s serve on the racquetball court.

“It’s encouraging to hear that I’ll still have a reputation in twenty years’ time,” says Tilly - Sylvia – giving Julian a gentle squeeze.

“Your Theory of Exotic Matter was integral to our understanding of, ah…” Miles is about to say ‘The Bajoran Wormhole,’ but he stops himself mid-sentence. He’s still clinging to the idea that he’s experiencing a hallucination (Julian - the real Julian - will be delighted that he’s found something more interesting than Quark’s maintenance problems to fantasise about), but if somehow he actually has travelled back in time he probably ought to refrain from mentioning the wormhole twenty years before its discovery. Sylvia Tilly though... Dax will die of envy if he ever gets the chance to tell her.

Julian huffs. “So you _do_ know she’s famous,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Before what?”

“Before he broke into my home so that he could use my lab to explore the theoretical quantum mechanics of a man from his own future travelling through time to visit him,” Tilly says archly.

Miles laughs, “he’s seven,” he says with forced patience. “There’s no way he could have done that.”

“You showed me how to crack the locks,” Julian says crossly. “I took pictures of them and then you helped me practice on the holo-projector until I could do it by myself. You were much older, then. You’re always older when we do the most fun things.” The last part is clearly intended as a complaint against Miles’s current disposition.

“Bloody hell,” says Miles. 

He steps away from the pair of them, needing a moment to think. He plants his elbows on the carved railing that circles the terrace and leans forward, watching the gannets circle over the ocean, diving down every now and then to snatch a fish from the churning sea.

Julian jumps down from the chair and comes to stand next to him, resting his chin on his folded hands beside Miles’s elbow. “Do you like it here?” he asks. “I do. It’s better than where we lived before I was in hospital.”

Miles bites down on the urge to tell him to go away. At least now he knows that a complete inability to tell when his presence isn’t wanted is a trait Doctor Bashir was born with rather than one carefully cultivated over time.

He lets out a long-suffering sigh and looks down at the boy, trying to remember what he knows about Bashir’s childhood. He thinks about all the times he’s listened to the Doctor prattle on about medical school, his ex-girlfriends, his almost-career as a professional tennis player... but those are all things he experienced as a young man. Given how talkative Bashir usually is, it suddenly seems strange that Miles doesn’t know a single thing about his life before he was accepted into Starfleet Academy. 

_It’s better than where we lived before I was in hospital_. What is he to make of that?

“Where are we, anyway?” he asks carefully, choosing the gentlest follow-up question he can think of.

Julian rocks his head to the side to look up into Miles's eyes. “New Zealand,” he says. 

“You’re very lucky,” Miles tells him, “there aren't too many places left on Earth that are this peaceful.”

Julian wrinkles his nose. “Why do adults think ‘peaceful’ places are so great?” he wonders. “Anyway, I don't live right here. I live with my mum, in the city. My dad’s going to come and live with us too when he gets back from Luna.”

“That sounds nice,” Miles says agreeably. “You know, I have to be apart from my family for work, too. I live on a space station and they live on a planet close by. I get to see them every couple of weeks, but it’s not the same as being together all the time, is it?”

Julian huffs dramatically, turning his face away to glare at the ocean. “My dad’s not working,” he says despondently. “He’s in a clinic, to stop gambling and doing other stuff with money.”

Tilly comes to stand on Julian’s other side and lets her hand rest lightly on the top of his head. “It’s a shame Hugh isn’t here,” she says casually, as though she never heard a word of Miles and Julian’s conversation even though she was standing right behind them the whole time. “I expect he would have liked to see the proof that his cerebrospinal mutation theory seems to be correct.”

“His theory?” Miles says archly, looking down at Julian.

Julian turns around so that he’s leaning the back of his head against the railing and smiles. “You really thought I figured out how you were time travelling on my own? Doctor Culber came up with it and then showed me how I’d be able to use the tricorder to check once I had the chance to scan you.” He turns back to Tilly. “Did you want me to com him?” He asks.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” she says. Julian smiles eagerly and dashes off.

“Still pretty smart for a kid his age,” Miles remarks. “I didn’t know any of that, about his dad. I didn’t want to ask him, but why was he hospitalised?”

Tilly shakes her head. “He doesn’t know. I think he tells himself that the procedure itself affected his memory, but I get the impression that what happened to him was so traumatic that he’s dissociated from it.”

Miles begins to think about the things that could befall a human child that could be all that bad, and quickly wishes he hadn’t.

“Do you know?” he asks

“I know because you told me, which means my telling you would create an ontological paradox. I love temporal mechanics,” she says with a satisfied sigh. “Maybe you should ask him… the version of him where you’re from, I mean.”

Miles isn’t sure there’s enough scotch in the world for that conversation.

“We’ve met before then, you and I?” he asks.

“A future version of you came to see me two days before Julian broke into my house.”

“Why would I do that? You and I don’t know each other in my timeline.” 

“I’m one hundred and ten years old,” she says wryly, “I doubt I’m still alive in your time. You brought him here,” she nods her head at Julian, who can be seen through the windows talking animatedly to someone over the com, “and I suppose he brings you... and isn’t that a paradox in itself? That was nearly four months ago now. He’s been back every day since.”

“Why?”

“More than anything else, it’s because I like him,” Tilly declares unabashedly, “and he seems to like me. We have a similar way of thinking, I think. I’ve been tutoring him. His mother doesn’t think he’s ready to go back into school yet. He’s…”

“Different?” Miles suggests.

She gives him a sharp look. “Is he?” she asks, “even in your time?”

“He’s smart,” Miles explains. “His work was nominated for the Carrington Award this year… he’s only twenty-nine years old! He’s well-liked, but not socially gifted... he's not always very aware of how his behaviour comes across, so he rubs a lot of people the wrong way without meaning to. It doesn’t matter to me,” he hastens to add. “Once you get to know him he’s…”

“Extraordinary?” Tilly suggests.

Miles rolls his eyes and smiles. “If you _must_ put it that way.”

Tilly turns her back on the cabin, her smile slowly fading to become a fierce, tight line. Miles finds himself following her gaze back towards the ocean. The Sylvia Tilly Miles knows from history was renowned for her tenacity and steel, but oddly enough the woman beside him right now reminds him of Julian. Julian facing down Gul Dukat in ops during the incident with Rugel last year… or standing up to Kai Winn when they’d disagreed about the morality of prolonging Vedek Bareil’s life a few months ago. Most of the time you’d never suspect he had it in him.

“There’s another reason,” she says. “When I was a cadet, I was fast-tracked out of Starfleet Academy to serve aboard a black-ops vessel developing classified weapons and technologies that would help the Federation win the war against the Klingons. The crew of the ship represented the most gifted scientists in Starfleet.” 

Her eyes flicker towards the motionless, white-eyed figure on the couch.

“The Captain,” she says. “The Captain was a something else. He was the kind of man who adhered to the philosophy that, ‘the ends justify the means’… but there is no end, is there? There are only means. Wars are lost and won, and the sun rises and sets and rises again. Every day we make choices, and those choices define who we are as individuals and as a civilisation. ” 

“Of course, we won the war. For the Federation, that meant the beginning of a golden age of exploration and peace… but now here you are, blown in from the eve of the greatest interstellar war humanity has ever seen. In such times, people like Captain Gabriel Lorca come for people like us, and we are weaponised, with or without our knowing consent.”

“People like us?” Miles asks.

“His name’s Paul,” she tells him, nodding towards her friend on the couch, “He was an astromycologist. That’s…”

“… an expert on space mushrooms,” Miles finishes for her. “My wife’s a botanist… and despite what she might think I do listen when she talks about her work. Most of the time, anyway.”

“His greatest ambition in life was to be able to 'talk to mushrooms',” Tilly explains. “He was brilliant, idealistic, extraordinary… heartbreakingly easy to manipulate. He was a hero. What Captain Lorca - what Starfleet – did to him in order to win our war was indefensible. I feel devastated whenever I think about it.”

She’s staring at the sea again now, but Miles knows enough about war – about the horrific choices it forces you to make – to know that she’s looking into the past. His stomach rolls at her seemingly prophetic statement about the next war. Although he has been a soldier, he’s been fortunate enough to have lived most of his life in relative peace, and as the father of a four-year-old, the idea that her generation might not have the same privilege terrifies him. 

“I’d do anything,” she says, “anything at all to stop that from happening to anyone else.”

Miles feels his stomach lurch again. He takes a deep, steadying breath.

“Your nauseous,” Tilly observes. “From what I’ve seen, that means you’re about to travel.

“Travel?” says Miles

And then, in a dizzying instant, he’s back on the promenade on DS9, the ocean still roaring in his ears. The world tilts sideways, and the last thing he sees before he blacks out is Doctor Julian Bashir falling to his knees beside him.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by the premise of 'The Time Traveller's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger, although as it's a Star Trek story the time travel has a technobabble explanation as opposed to being full magical realism.
> 
> I was having a hard time trying to finish C4 of 'All the Shades of Truth' this weekend and realised that I wasn't in a good place to be writing about politics and angst... so I let myself write some O'Brien and Bashir hurt/comfort instead.


End file.
